Hello! I'm Imelda Maguire, SoulCollage® facilitator from Donegal, Ireland. Also a counselor and poet, my joy is in working with others in healing and creativity. This column is for those of you who have already made some cards & are ready to discover the symphony of voices inside of you and around you.


Honoring Your Heritage with SoulCollage®

I've been using SoulCollage® for over ten years, and have become aware as time passes, and as I allow cards to be created intuitively (or to create themselves, as some would say), new areas of my psyche constantly present themselves. Case in point - the emergence of a small but very meaningful group of cards, the significance of which has only become clear to me after some time. Each is related in some way to my Irish heritage.

I have no idea how many of us find that SoulCollage® connects us more deeply with our heritage, but I suspect that there will be quite a few. After all, the process brings to light all sorts of aspects of our selves, and parts of us are surely coloured by our history - personal, familial, cultural.

The beginning of my journey in this field was with the card I call The Hand of the Ancestor. This image is of the hand of a preserved 'bog-body' emerging from a landscape similar to that in which my father was brought up. In fact, such bodies had been found near to his homeplace.

This image seemed to beckon to me, to call to me. I am one who asks to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be honoured. I am the hand of your ancestors.

Sure enough, in time, my Race Memory of Hunger card emerged, using some drawings of victims of the Irish famine of the mid-1800s, and some images of potatoes, the crop whose failure caused mass-starvation and emigration. I found myself connecting deeply with the memory I did not know I held, of my ancestors somehow surviving that terrible time.

Other cards which draw on and honour my heritage contain images of the typical streets of my hometown in my childhood: one represents my Catholic heritage and another the craft of dressmaking which was the occupation of my maternal grandmother and aunts.

Naturally, it was when I was facilitating a class in Denmark that the most strikingly "Irish" card formed itself (complete with a map of Ireland found in a Danish magazine)! As with many of my cards, this one has been evolving in its message to me, but I feel it is very much linked with a sense of the spiritual destiny of my homeland - once the "Island of Saints and Scholars" - and a sense it may reclaim this status in the future. The card has become my visual "prayer for Ireland."

I am now on the lookout for images from Celtic mythology and history to build further on the story being told to me through my SoulCollage® deck. I'm really interested to know how others find their cards relate to their heritage. Please email me your own discoveries via my blog.


Imelda Maguire is a SoulCollage® facilitator from Donegal, Ireland. A counsellor, poet, Bach Flower Remedy practitioner, and creative-writing facilitator, her joy is in working with others, in witnessing a-ha moments and experiences of healing. She has been sharing SoulCollage® with groups since 2003, when she first discovered the process, and delights in others' excitement on meeting their Neters for the first time.
 

Once Upon A Mythos
with SoulCollage® Facilitator Cat Caracelo